The Catholic School Page 2

  I couldn’t say whether, as an adult, Arbus ever dedicated himself to these video games with their hyperrealistic graphics, which bring together the greatest imaginable verisimilitude with the sheer height of absurdity. If for no other reason than that I imagine he would like such an abstract and powerful blend, yet served up cold, by a computer. I’ve always thought that Arbus’s life was restricted to his mind, and was therefore expansive beyond all limits. In the secret circuits of the brain—that was where things materialized. All things. If the phrase had already been coined back then, the world my friend inhabited might very easily have been called a virtual world. Within the sheltering shell of his intelligence, a great many more things happened than in his everyday routine as a young prodigy, that is, a day in which there was time only for school, piano lessons, and the postural gymnastics that he had to do every day, with the assistance of machinery that resembled instruments of torture, with straps and steel springs, to keep his spinal cord in alignment in spite of his growth spurt. Yet another phenomenon of development and its collateral effects. Something ungovernable and deep down, unedifying, if at the very most it took the form of a mark on the wall a few inches higher than the one carved last year. How satisfying. But in Arbus’s mind there was sufficient space to contain all and every argument and adventure, and nothing was excluded from the outset because it might be too challenging or strange or dangerous or vicious. Arbus’s mind was boundless, it stopped at nothing, it recognized no limits, and it overcame them practically without realizing it. It might take any hypothesis under consideration, even the most horrifying ones.

  I remember that one time in class we studied the theory of a writer who had proposed, as a sort of macabre joke formulated in a solemn language (it wasn’t all that clear, in other words, whether or not he meant what he said), that children be eaten as a way of alleviating the hunger of the masses. It’s well known that much of what is taught in school, starting with the humanities, at first glance appears to be senseless or exaggerated or tossed out just to elicit reactions. “These people are out of their minds” is the phrase that springs to your lips every time you study a philosophical or literary doctrine, or else actual history: the emperor who had the sea whipped, the pineal gland, the theory that a cat might be simultaneously alive and dead, an excursion to the moon where the juice from the brains of men who’ve gone mad is kept in bottles, a chorus of mummies that sings at midnight, monads “with no doors or windows,” and then the great political theorist who suggests you invite your adversaries to dinner and then have them strangled . . . Highly revered characters who hang themselves one after the other, who devour their children, have sex with their mothers, poison themselves in the belief that they can be brought back to life, the most and the least, the last who will be first, to be alive and to be dead are the same thing, and so on and so forth.

  THEN WHEN THE TEACHER EXPLAINED that the author of this modest proposal was the same man who had written Gulliver’s Travels, we understood that it was someone accustomed to retailing tall tales and felt reassured with a dose of the typical skepticism that a student employs in the face of the umpteenth loony doctrine. It goes without saying that the only one of us who found this theory sensible, although difficult to put into practice, was Arbus, who in the end was forced to admit that it was absurd, but only for considerations of hygiene.

  WE WERE RATHER UNIMAGINATIVE DREAMERS. Our chief sources of stimulation were television and dirty jokes, of which I have to admit I rarely got the point, I mean to say, the whole point. I would laugh, pretending I had gotten it, while all I had gotten was that this was when I was supposed to laugh. Just as there is full nudity, there is the whole point of a joke. Let’s say that I sensed it, that I did my best to guess at the point. My solitary efforts to interpret the unknown led me to original discoveries and colossal misunderstandings, some of which were never refuted and still survive today. The erotic autodidact is no better off than the scientific autodidact. At age twelve, for instance, ashamed of my ignorance but even more so of asking questions, I didn’t know the meaning of the word “condom,” and for an entire summer and the autumn that followed I was convinced that it was a kind of lubricant that was kept in small smoked-glass bottles, just like nose drops. It was hard for me to guess its exact use. I don’t know how I deduced that piece of information. Certain of my classmates were well ahead of me in this field, but far behind me in others. The advancement of adolescents is irregular, in fact we might say that the age between twelve and fifteen doesn’t really exist as an age at all, with its standard prerequisites, given that in it there coexist attitudes and events and even before that bodies, physical bodies, of every size and appearance, and of every possible sex plus other improbable sexes that exist only during adolescence and then disappear, components that have nothing to do with each other, one being diametrically opposed to the other, pure contradiction: and in fact those years are lived with a barbaric spirit, assembling the shattered suits of armor of our childhood games with the fragments of a future that is always imagined as being far more a place of science fiction than it will actually prove to be.

  All games call for prizes, but especially punishments. There’s usually only one prize, just as there’s only one winner, and it comes at the end, while the punishments are countless, almost everyone gets them, and they are inflicted progressively over the course of the game, and every season of life has its own: depending on what is dearest to us, that is what is taken away, while what we most fear or are most ashamed of stings and drowns us, amid choruses of laughter. This is a form of “paying the penalty,” doing penitence. You can be punished in your pride, in your face, watching your snack money being stolen or being obliged to study the oboe; and when the sexual games begin, of course, the sexual punishments begin with them, the most horrific of which is sexual exclusion. Rejection, however friendly the terms in which it’s couched. Oh yes, even more than forced inclusion. Perhaps that’s why I was trying to keep pace with the vulgarities, with the pornography, verbal even before it became visual, at the cost of having to invent explanations for everything on my own. The times and the techniques. The secret, that is, which could be found in special magazine sex supplements, shrink-wrapped inside the issue to make sure that kids couldn’t peek at them on the newsstand. God, how ignorant and underdeveloped we were! The whole world conspired to keep us that way, and in the final analysis it was the priests alone, our archaic teachers, who lifted a finger to free us from that limbo. Willy nilly.

  “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, all of you! Who gave you the condom?”

  That’s exactly what he said, “condom,” in the singular. I thought that it must be a kind of medicine, or anyway, who knows why, something liquid, and precious or dangerous, contained in a small bottle from which it could be doled out with an eyedropper, like a poison or, perhaps, opium. When I later discovered, without any further details, that it was a contrivance that kept girls from getting pregnant, I insisted on believing for no good reason that it was some kind of liquid, I thought that the condom needed to be sparingly applied, drop by drop, on your dick . . .

  IF I WERE ASKED to begin the story of Arbus from the very beginning, I would be hard put because, as I’ve explained before, for a long time his presence attracted no notice in class, more or less like a rock in the desert. Immobile, off-color, he hardly even breathed. If not a rock, then let us say a reptile. His priceless way of blending in functioned almost throughout middle school, which he passed through incognito. But then when little by little he became popular (well, let’s be clear on this, relatively popular: because in reality Arbus was never really loved at school, rather he was the object of morbid curiosity, rumor-mongering, looked upon as a phenomenon, in a certain sense, venerated, and therefore kept at arm’s length), in other words, when Arbus became famous for his monstrous intellectual capacities, he began to be enveloped in a blizzard of legends and such hyperbolic formulations as “Arbus has no beginning nor will he ever have an end,” “He
is the Word,” and when we began our first lessons in philosophy, all the formulations from the textbook were pinned on him, rendering them finally understandable, among other things. The tag of “unmoved mover,” taken from Aristotle, for instance, fit him to a T and perfectly rendered the idea of an imperturbable power. The teachers usually didn’t bother to test him, since they knew that he’d give all the right answers anyway. And the few times that they did test him, immediately after the exchange there was always someone in the back of the room who added in a solemn tone: “Ipse dixit.” Moreover he was given nicknames with the most abstruse concepts, especially if expressed in Greek or foreign words, so that in correspondence with the curriculum he was called variously Apeiron, Mantissa, the Gnomon, Mummy, and Synapse.

  High school students’ sense of humor isn’t (or wasn’t) particularly inspired. In the sense that it involves relatively little imagination and almost exclusively makes use of what comes to hand, that is, in textbooks and in class. It reduces the universe to the scope of a Cliff’s Notes and then continues to work on that to reduce it still smaller, miniaturizing, swept up in the same perfectionistic and caricatural delirium that led some, before classroom exercises, to copy over in characters scant microns across whole chapters on a scrap of paper that could be rolled up inside the shaft of a Bic ballpoint pen. It was a technique straight out of a spy movie, so laborintensive that it would have been much less work simply to study those chapters. The result of this mind-set were ditties, bland parodies. “Knock, knock. / Who’s there? / Euripides. / Euripides who? / Euripides trousers?” (the gags all had this dated, almost classical flavor) and “Knock, knock. / Who’s there? / Eumenides. / Eumenides who? / Eumenides trousers?” The same kind of stuff that our fathers might have recited with an identical sophomoric snicker. “This is Lavinia, your future bride / feel her down under, slip your finger inside.”

  School in my days and Arbus’s days was still in many ways as it had been in the postwar years (but how long did these blessed postwar years go on and, above all, when is it that they finally stopped stopping?), and it would change before our eyes, or perhaps I should say, under our feet—I mean to say, as children, we entered a school that seemed eternal, eternally unchanged, and when we got out, everything had changed from top to bottom, the world, the school, of course us, but even the priests who ran it were no longer the same, they were no longer the old stiff-necked bigots with the haggard faces of Spanish saints, their eyes burning with who knows what, perhaps in fact it was the priests who changed more than anything else. The only thing about them that remained the same was the tunic.

  OUR SCHOOL, the SLM Institute, was a private school, religious in nature, with a monthly tuition and boarding fee, and teachers who were nearly all priests, especially in the elementary classes. In middle school and high school, the lay teachers became more and more numerous until, in the last couple of years, they were in the majority. You might deduce from this fact that the priests weren’t prepared to teach anything more complicated than the lowest or most generic levels of instruction (such as: reading, writing, and arithmetic); or that, quite the contrary, they reserved for themselves the first few years in their students’ education, since those are the most decisive from every point of view, including the religious sphere, which was near and dear to their own hearts and the hearts of the families (though not all of them, as we shall see). Probably both things were true. The Institute stood and still stands on Via Nomentana near the Basilica di Santa Costanza, and therefore on the eastern border of the Quartiere Trieste, a border that in fact runs along Via Nomentana, the long tree-lined boulevard, dense with traffic and romanticism, that ends at Porta Pia, where the Bersaglieri breached the walls and entered Rome. The salient events of our story will take place in the rectangle encompassed by Via Nomentana, the Tangenziale Est, or eastern bypass, Via Salaria, and Viale Regina Margherita. Nowadays the Institute, perhaps because of financial problems or for a lack of paying students, which amounts to the same thing, has been split up and reduced in size, and the buildings overlooking Via Nomentana, where the high school classes were once taught, are now occupied by a university that—before noticing the sign next to the gate, just a few yards away from the entrance to the pool where I now go to swim a couple of times a week—I had never even heard of. At the time in which this story takes place, the SLM Institute could fairly be called a very modern school.

  2

  THERE ARE THOSE who maintain that the cult of the Virgin Mary is an archaic holdover from the powerful and widespread matriarchal religions that came before the advent of male deities and also defied their dominion; others instead see in that cult the symbolic and highly effective reduction of a woman’s role to that of mother, exclusively mother—loving mother, sorrowful, dolorous mother; yet others view it as the sole and invaluable acknowledgment—within the context of a monotheism rigidly based upon such male figures as the father, the son, and the patriarch—of the decisive importance of the female half of the species, not only in ensuring that the world exists, but also that it be both humane and inhabitable. To put it in other words, let’s just be relieved that there’s a woman in that gallery of bearded, highly vocal men. At least we have Her. She at least is there to rehabilitate Her sex from the beginning of things, so badly ruined by the misbegotten actions of her foremother. The religious order of the brothers of SLM was dedicated to the Virgin for all these reasons, plus the other, more obvious one, namely to ensure that there be a Mother to worry about and watch over the rearing and education of children and young men, the loveliest and most attentive and patient and indulgent of mothers, but also (as in the wonderful painting by Max Ernst, La Vierge corrigeant l’Enfant Jésus, or Young Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus in Front of Three Witnesses) a Mother capable of administering punishment when necessary, albeit in a perfectly lighthearted manner. It really is hard to imagine (in spite of the various schools of thought about child-rearing that were progressively establishing themselves in those years, to the point that they became a sort of unquestioned common sense, maintaining exactly this view) that there could be any form of education that called for no form of punishment whatsoever. And I say this because punishments, leaving aside any consideration of whether they are just and proper retribution and whether they actually result in deterrence—it is surely reasonable to question whether they are and whether they do—in any case serve to develop in those who are subjected to them, rightly or wrongly, an anger that might prove quite useful if it can only be turned to the purposes of the education in question. Punishments, then, are useful as a way of testing and developing an individual’s resistance rather than breaking it. Only those who are shattered by the punishments they receive actually transform them into pointless humiliations, which they will then proceed to resent and wallow in obsessively. For everyone else, punishments constitute merely so many ordeals to be overcome, much like the Labors of Hercules, calling upon inner resources that only in this fashion can one discover, to one’s astonishment, and make use of. Strength and intelligence and even personal dignity, then, begin to run in the veins of those who resist and react to punishment, qualities that would otherwise remain in a dormant state; one would never even know that one possessed them. In other words, it’s not sufficiently appreciated that morale precedes morality, but in time there is a complete confluence of the two, and that among the constituent elements of both morale and morality we should also count the resentments created by authority with its acts of repression. It’s a very simple chemical reaction in the soul. Neither revolutionaries nor patriots, scientists, or even ordinary bank clerks, much less nurses and lawyers and dermatologists, would ever develop into fully formed persons unless someone along their path, much like in the game of snakes and ladders, chose to hinder their progress from time to time, by sending them back to square one, inflicting a penalty, and often for contrived reasons or at the slightest misstep. Any initiation cannot help but be painful, at least in part.

  THE PRIESTS
of the SLM Institute were well acquainted with the virtues of the Virgin Mary and how to make the best use of them in the course of their teaching, a pursuit that was at the basis of their calling. Just as there are military orders and mendicant orders, so there were the brothers of SLM, an order predicated upon the mission of teaching. Certainly, it was a bizarre detail that the principles of their protrectress should be applied by a community consisting exclusively of men; and that the recipients of their loving efforts should also be only and exclusively male. Teachers and students at SLM: all males, with just one great Mother and Queen, like some sort of beehive. The priests’ objective—tenacious gardeners that they were, tilling a garden of pumpkins and tomatoes, was to raise young men to adulthood and eventually take them to ripe maturity as good Christians; the first of these goals was by no means an easy one, while the second, which may perhaps at the time of the order’s foundation (1816) have seemed obvious and straightforward, with the passing of time had become increasingly daunting, up to and including the period in which our story unfolds, when the very expression “good Christian” had become indecipherable and everyone interpreted it as they saw fit, adding to it psychological or political shadings—the pope meant one thing by it, individual worshippers quite another, and even sinners could rightly proclaim themselves to be good Christians, indeed, perhaps the very best, seeing that they were the raw material, the ultimate evangelical resource, the latest generation of prodigal sons and potential Mary Magdalenes, an authentic seedbed worthy of tending for eventual redemption, in short, and in fact it was these last-mentioned paragons that the students of SLM wound up most closely resembling: aspiring young sinners.